Facebook has been a surprise. I was tricked into joining MySpace, and indeed, lurked there for a while. But my heart was never in it.
Then, like a confused lemming, I fell into Facebook, and, with reservations, Facebook has been fun.
I have never moved email folders from one computer to the next, so each new computer has been like shedding a skin; I start anew with no friends.
Facebook has seen all the untransferred friends bounding out of the woodwork with glee and exclamation marks.
It is now a provable fact that I have 204 friends. They visit regularly and they make sure I am right up with the play. Email doesn't do that. As possibly the laziest man in Christendom, I see this as a wonderful thing.
I give Facebook seven out of 10 as to whether I need it in my life.
It certainly isn't up there with Curb Your Enthusiasm or peanut butter.
The reservations are what stops it going any higher.
Facebook has a box that appears on the top of the page asking What's On Your Mind? This is onanism beyond all onanism ever onanismed.
I immediately began filling in this box with words of Teutonic unimportance.
Roy is wondering whether to scratch his wrist, or, Roy is wondering which shoe to put on first and which shoe to put on second.
Inexplicably, people liked this. They pressed the button that said I Like This. Some even commented, after pressing the button that said Comment. Soon I was filling this box regularly and eagerly awaiting comments.
I had become a sit-down comedian.
Then, with my audience captive, I perversely changed hats, and became caring and sensitive.
I posted photos of the first grandson starting preschool with his little lunch box, and, last week, the second grandson sitting in a bath with his blankey the day he turned A-Half.
I offered sympathy to Facebook friends with malfunctioning pets. Women raced to comment, visibly weeping. Men were highly sceptical.
Facebook's worst feature is its teeming raft of idiot games.
Mafia Wars disfigured my home page for months, and I still don't know what it is.
Farmville, a more recent social networking pandemic, was heading the same way until a friend at the university with her own car park offered to lash my farm into shape. I didn't even know I had a farm. Two months on, she assures me my farm is one of the finest on Facebook.
She says it has sparklers on it. Just like all the farms in Southland, I retorted wittily.
With my farm so flagrantly up and running, people have been sending me avocado trees, red maple leaves, eggplant and even a goat.
Occasionally, I send them a gift back, a birdbath or a goose topiary.
I don't know if this makes their farm better or whether it just makes them smile inwardly.
The men again have been critical, mocking me mercilessly on the unproven premise that Farmville is a woman's game.
I post explanatory messages about the woman at the university with her own car park. The mock continues.
One woman sent me a request asking to be fertilised. I gave her name to the authorities.
But I am playing one game, Snowball Fight, with Ella of Michigan, whose mother used to run my music store.
I have learned how to throw snowballs, but I don't know how to win.
I pound Ella with Auras Of Doom or Flames Of Fury, and then I check Results, and see she is still winning.
How? I have three-quarters of an arts degree, Ella is thirteen.
This kind of unregulated intellectual levelling will keep Facebook from ever being more than seven out of 10.
But seven isn't bad when you consider the All Blacks, until last Sunday, have only been five, and Twitter is clearly a nought.
I soldier on. We are living in very strange times.
Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
